Disdaining
the "surfer" mentality of his California boyhood
friends, Anthony Zerbe chose to head to New York to become an actor.
He studied with Stella Adler and worked off-Broadway before achieving
success in the mid-'60s. He made his film debut in 1967's Will Penny,
after which he settled into a series of sharkish, saturnine villainous
portrayals.

Zerbe preferred
to work with people who allowed him "space" to develop a
characterization; one such person was David Janssen, with whom he appeared
on the mid-'70s TV series Harry O (in which he won an Emmy
award for his portrayal of Lieutenant Trench).

Active on-stage
and in films and television into the 1990s, Anthony Zerbe has contributed
some unforgettable acting moments to the big screen, notably as the
shadow-enshrouded leper in 1971's Papillon, 1975's Rooster
Cogburn with John Wayne, Matthias in The Omega Man (1971) opposite
Charlton Heston, and of course as the "blowed up real good" secondary
villain, Milton Krest in the 1989 James Bond opus License to
Kill.

In 1990
he starred in the 9th Star Trek movie, Insurrection as Admiral Dougherty
as well as the 3 Matrix movies as Councillor Hamman